HENRY
WIENCEK SPEAKS IN NORFOLK SEPT. 23

Celebrated author provides perspective on George Washington
and his slaves
~ Book signing to conclude the evening ~

NORFOLK, Va. – (Aug. 4, 2004) – Tidewater
Community College invites the public to hear author and renowned
historian Henry
Wiencek, 7 p.m., Sept. 23, at the TCC
Jeanne and George Roper Performing Arts Center. He will examine
slavery along with the life and morals of George Washington, the
subject of his latest book, An Imperfect God, published
in 2003.

The free, public event continues with distinguished
historian and author Alf Mapp, who will respond
to Wiencek’s talk. Mapp, a respected Thomas Jefferson scholar
well known in Hampton Roads, recently published The Faiths
of Our Fathers.

Wiencek’s An Imperfect God, hailed
as one of the best books of the year, explores Washington’s
life, revealing the grisly struggle of American slavery and his
personal evolution to die as an abolitionist. In Wiencek’s
previous book, The Hairstons: An American Family in Black
and White, his coverage of slavery, Jim Crowe and the civil
rights movement garnered the 1999 National Book Critics’
Circle Award in biography. The book was also featured on the CSPAN
Book TV, “60 Minutes” and the television mini-series
rights have been acquired for broadcast on CBS.

Wiencek was born in 1952 and educated at Yale University.
He is a writer and senior research fellow at the Virginia Foundation
for the Humanities. He has written dozens of books, mostly on
historical homes and places, and has produced numerous books for
the Smithsonian, National Geographic and Time-Life on
historic architecture. Janet Maslin of The New York Times
describes him as a masterful historian.

TCC launches this American History Lecture Series
in conjunction with a grant to train teachers and improve SOL
scores by teaching history through a local lens. The public lecture
series, featuring accomplished historians, is one part of the
program to improve history education in the region.

Wiencek’s books will be for sale and he will
hold a book signing immediately following the lecture.

Reprinted from the author’s material:
An Emancipator’s Journey

An Imperfect God: George Washington, His
Slaves, and the Creation of America by Henry Wiencek
(Farrar. Nov. 0-374-17526. $30)

The great American subject of race is at the center
of Henry Wiencek’s National Book Critics Circle Award–winning
The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White,
and, as the author recalls, it informed his interest in next writing
“a book about slavery in the era of the Founding.”
When his agent proposed that he instead write a biography of George
Washington, Wiencek was reluctant, certain that there was “nothing
new to discover about him.” Then came the dramatic announcement
in 1998 of DNA test results proving that Thomas Jefferson had
fathered a child by one of his slaves, Sally Hemings, quickly
followed by a similar story alleging that Washington had also
had a child, West Ford, with a slave. “That fascinated me
because it seemed to indicate a strong possibility that Washington
had black kin, if not a black son,” says Wiencek. “It
opened a whole new psychological dimension and a new path for
fresh research.”

An Imperfect God is both a life of Washington
and an exploration of early American slavery. It investigates
how a man born to the Virginia plantation system could end up
dramatically rejecting it by freeing his 124 slaves at the end.
The story of the President’s last will has long been known
but not the lifetime of thinking that preceded it. “The
facts about Washington’s struggle against slavery had to
be buried [by earlier writers] because they challenged the myth
of an innocent past,” Wiencek argues, pointing out how Washington’s
“moral development” was in fact the very opposite
of Jefferson’s: “Washington began as an enthusiastic
slave master, grew to hate slavery, and acted to end it. Jefferson
began as an emancipator, fought against the ‘wicked’
(his word) injustices of the slave system, devised plans to end
it, but gradually embraced slavery for reasons we do not yet fully
understand.”

While finding his way to an honest, modern admiration
for Washington, Wiencek freshens the moral horror of the slavers’
landscape in which his subject lived. “It was a great challenge
to write about Washington and slavery,” Wiencek tells LJ,
“because I tried not to whitewash the past, but I also had
to guard against setting myself up as a prosecutor. The other
part of the challenge is that the more you study Washington the
more you admire him; you have to struggle to keep your objectivity.”

After exhausting all the available historical research,
Wiencek ended up unconvinced by the story of Washington’s
paternity. What he produced instead is a totally original consideration
of race and our elusive first President. “The documents
neither confirm nor deny the oral history. It’s a question
of character. My aim, which I hope I achieved, was to judge Washington
and his era by his standards and not by mine.”

Tidewater Community College
is the second largest of the 23 community colleges in the Commonwealth
of Virginia, enrolling more than 34,000 students annually. The 37th
largest in the nationís 1,600 community-college network, TCC ranks
among the 50 fastest-growing large community colleges. Founded in
1968 as a part of the Virginia Community College System, the college
serves the South Hampton Roads region with campuses in Chesapeake,
Norfolk, Portsmouth and Virginia Beach as well as the TCC Jeanne
and George Roper Performing Arts Center in the theater district
in downtown Norfolk, the Visual Arts Center in Olde Towne Portsmouth
and a regional Advanced Technology Center in Virginia Beach. Forty-three
percent of the regionís residents attending a college or university
in Virginia last fall were enrolled at TCC.